Super Mario Turns 25

Share.

How Nintendo redefined everything before and after.

By Michael Thomsen

It's tempting to think of videogame history as a linear progression, generations of hardware and game ideas stacked on top of each other in a communal totem reaching perpetually upwards. The truth is much more random. Gaming history is better described as a series of moments where definitive concepts unexpectedly came into focus, clarifying years of structureless experimentation in the shapeless murk of time. There have been few other moments as transformative and energizing as the emergence of Mario, the mascot for the entire industry who turns 25 years-old in North America today. He seems as inevitable as bubble gum or Marilyn Monroe, but it was luck as much as anything that helped him reshape the idea of a videogame and, in all likelihood, saved the industry from years of fumbling decline.

In the '70s videogames went through their first and most dramatic expansion. Arcade machines eagerly spread across North America and, shortly after, the Atari 2600 popularized the idea of owning your own gaming machine. Videogames entered popular American culture without the juvenile stigmas that have subsequently come to cling to the industry. Games were played by children and adults alike, often in public. Their visuals were abstract enough to appeal to a wide array of tastes and the gameplay was simple and reflexive. Everything was a simple geometric shape, lit in bright colors that played on primitive symbology and competitive instincts to make something that was, like all newly formed media branches, instantly intuitive.

The cultural emergence of videogames created a gold rush that public demand seemed only-too-happy to encourage. A gaggle of home console competitors jumped into the market and programmers began to crank out 2600 games as quickly as possible, many based on an absurd variety of licensed brands from Star Wars to Kool-Aid. Arcade games continued to blossom with more adventurous and colorful games like Galaxian, Battle Zone, Radar Scope, Ms. Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong. Meanwhile, computer advocates pushed videogames along a more complicated axis with early text-based games like Zork and Multi-User Dungeon experiences built from the RPG scaffolding of Dungeons & Dragons. The industry was expanding in every direction--including the first self-identified art games with Jaron Lanier's Alien Garden and Moondust for the 2600.

Which is why it was a shock when the industry went into a major recession in 1983, most dramatically affecting Atari because of the overproduction of copycat games that had finally worn out public enthusiasm for paying top prices for the same blocky formula of bleeps and bloops. At the same time, Nintendo, a Japanese novelty company that had experienced some success with arcade cabinets and portable Game & Watch devices, was nearing completion on its Famicom project. Early in 1983, Atari representatives visited Kyoto to see a prototype of the Famicom and were very close to buying the North American rights to the machine, which they'd either have declined to distribute so as to clear the market of another competitor or repackage as an extension of the Atari brand.

Nintendo is rightly credited with reviving the videogame industry from its first serious market contraction, but had Atari decided to buy the Famicom rights everything subsequent would have evolved along a much different path. To better understand what might have been, it deserves another look back at what it was that Mario actually brought to the industry and culture when he finally arrived in North America in 1985.

Mario's most lasting impact was in bringing the public perception of gaming back into focus around one simple but comprehensive experience. In the same way that Atari had become a synonym for "videogame" in the late '70s, Mario became the Kleenex of the industry, both a character, brand, and design aesthetic that crystallized what most people had loved about the form while showing how it could evolve beyond the arcanum of text dumps and rectangular blobs. Super Mario Bros. was a combination of narrative, story, and gameplay challenge, each category mixing with the other to create a game that can't be reduced to any single element.

Foremost among Mario's achievements was the connection of his jump mechanic to the idea of a long and one-way journey across a surreal landscape of winged turtles, angry mushrooms, and fire-breathing dinosaurs. The game had an aesthetic scope and detail that no game to that point could match, creating 32 levels as a linear path from a pastoral lowland to dank sewers to mountain tops to underwater seas to the dark night passage across a snow-white plain, then punctuated with scrambles through medieval castles lit with fireballs and lava. It's easy to gloss over the dramatic aesthetic changes between levels when looking back, but in 1985 there was no other game as carefully built around the idea of passage through a range of landscapes. Though its themes of anthropomorphized nature are especially connected to Japanese folklore, its scope and purpose are Homeric. It's The Odyssey of videogames, both in concept and execution.